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In the ethical monotheism of late Judaism and early Christianity, Yahweh (originally a minor warrior deity of a small federation of habiru tribes in the region of Sinai who eventually became the creator of heaven and earth) was regarded as the supreme judge over the destiny of human beings. He demanded exclusive worship and absolute obedience from his devotees, in exchange for which he provided them with protection and a prosperous life.

The “fear of the Lord” – not living in abject terror of god but with reverent awareness of his watchful supervision – was thus an acknowledgment of the human being’s accountability as a moral agent before the One whose will is the Way of all things.

This fusion of human moral accountability and the omnipotent will of god would create numerous crises for believers over the centuries. From the Babylonian invasion and exile of 586 BCE, through the calamitous failure of Jesus’ revolution, to the twentieth-century holocaust (or Shoah) in which millions of Jews and other faithful were killed, the contradiction in believing that a benevolent deity is in control as innocent human beings suffer has driven many once-devoted theists to abandon their belief in god.

For as long as theism regarded deities as personified agencies of cosmic and natural forces, human suffering could be chalked up to fate – “That’s just the way it is.” But after the Bible’s ethical monotheism elevated the will of god above everything else, a crisis was just a matter of time.

Try as we might to uphold divine sovereignty by making human beings somehow deserving of their suffering (e.g., an individual’s unconfessed sin, inherited guilt from previous generations, or the total depravity of human nature); or on the other side, by appealing to god’s inscrutable plan, the soul-therapy of pain and loss, or adjusting the mixer board of orthodoxy so that god’s righteousness is bumped above his compassion – all of this compromise to our ethical and rational sensibilities has put belief in god’s existence out of the question for many.

Does this leave us with atheism then? It sounds like we need to drop all this nonsense and move on. Haven’t we disproved god’s existence by now, tolerated the logical and moral contradictions, or at least gone long enough without evidence to support the claim? If theism has ruined its credit in our modern minds, isn’t atheism all that’s left?

A good part of this blog is dedicated to clarifying a different conclusion. Just because many of us are no longer able – more importantly we aren’t willing – to sacrifice intellect for faith doesn’t necessarily mean that theism has to be trashed, or that it’s been fatally exposed as a farce.

It could also mean that theism has done its job.

For a time when we were young (so runs my argument) we depended on higher powers to help us feel secure, supervise our development, and exemplify the character virtues that promote cooperation and goodwill. Every family system is a kind of theism where taller powers provide for underlings in these and other ways, and they in turn try to be obedient and respectful of parental authority.

The fear of the Lord was continually in our awareness of being accountable for our words, choices, and behavior. Doing good came back in praise and reward; doing bad called down blame and punishment. If our taller powers were involved and diligent, we eventually came to understand that ‘the world’ (our household) was an interdependent system where our actions had consequences – not just for us alone but for the system as a whole.

In ancient and traditional societies this world model of a household was projected outward onto a larger – in the case of Judaism’s ethical monotheism, a cosmic – scale, where a patron deity (like Yahweh) was imagined as watching over his children, demanding their obedience, and providing for their needs. Such a model of reality gave assurance that the tribe and its individual members weren’t orphans adrift in an indifferent or hostile universe.

Their god personified a provident intention in the greater cosmos, but s/he also reminded them that human beings are part of something larger and owe their contribution to the whole. No action went unnoticed by god; later, Jesus would insist that not even our thoughts and desires are hidden from “the father who sees in secret.” Humans are one big sibling society under the will of the fatherly Yahweh, and each of us is accountable to him. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

We realize now as never before that our representations of ultimate reality are metaphorical constructions that not only assist our contemplation of what is beyond name and form but also serve to link the business of daily life to a transcendent center of value and meaning. Yahweh is a mythic character, a literary figure, a theological construct who personified the provident mystery of reality as superintendent over nature and all nations.

While it is the case that Bible stories tell of Yahweh’s great accomplishment “in the beginning,” his intervention on behalf of Hebrew slaves, his guidance and support of refugees through the wilderness, his revelation of laws by which to govern the community, his ventriloquism through the prophets, his incarnation in Jesus, the fertilization of a new community by his spirit, his orchestration of the missionary church, and the preparation currently underway for the apocalyptic final curtain – we commonly overlook the fact that all of this takes place inside the imaginarium of myth.

Because biblical (or more accurately, mythological) literalists are considering these stories from a standpoint outside this imaginarium – which names a mode of consciousness that is shaped and fully immersed in its own narrative constructions of meaning – the veracity of Yahweh’s character for them must be a function of his separate existence, apart from the stories themselves. In other words, these are not mere stories (certainly not myths!) but eye-witness reports of actual supernatural facts and miraculous events.

It was this loss of the mythic imagination which motivated the conviction that would eventually set the stage for theism’s disproof by science.

We could have gone the route of seeing through the myths as metaphorical representations of reality, and as mythopoetic (rather than scientific) constructions of meaning. In that case, theism might have taken the role of orienting human consciousness in reality, providing mystical grounding and moral guidance in the formation of identity, and then assisted the further transformation of consciousness by facilitating its liberation from ego in a transpersonal re-orientation to life within the turning unity of all things. The pernicious divisions of soul and body, self and other, human and nature would have been transcended and healed, lifting us into a conscious experience of community, wholeness, fulfillment, and wellbeing.

But things went in a different direction.

Now, on the other side of our sacred stories (seeing through them rather than seeing by them) and taking up our lives after god (post-theism), we still have an opportunity to embrace that ancient proverb: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. For us, however, it’s not about living under the watchful, provident, and retributive supervision of a god. We can save the kernel of its wisdom and release the husk of theism that protected it for millenniums.

It’s not that we should live in such a way that pleases god the father and motivates his blessing in return. The personified character of god in the myths was only the ‘husk’ inside of which the precious insight was honored and kept – the insight that we are not getting away with anything.

We are accountable. Our beliefs, values, and actions affect much more than we know, for we belong to a larger living system. What we do locally amplifies in its effects to impact global conditions, which in turn nourish, limit, or undermine our local quality of life.

Not only are we not ‘getting away’ from this situation by some escape route to a perfect world (a utopian future or heavenly paradise), the integral intelligence of systemic feedback that is our planet and its cosmic environment will continue to bring back to us the consequences of our daily choices. And as we can see with the effects of industrial pollution and global warming, these consequences are now crossing a critical threshold.

What we sow in our inner life (soul) comes out as health or illness in our body. What we do to others (as Jesus pointed out, especially our enemies) comes back on our self. The degree or lack of reverence and care that we demonstrate for the household of nature reflects the dignity we affirm our deny in our own human species. All is one, and we’re all in this together.

Religion tends to be different from a mere philosophy of life in its claim to offer a way through, out of, or beyond what presently holds us back or stands in the way of our highest fulfillment. In the genuine traditions of spirituality, such a solution avoids the temptation of either an other-worldly escape on the one hand, or on the other a do-it-yourself program where individuals must struggle to make it on their own. It’s not only a perspective on reality that religion provides, then, but a way of salvation – a path in life that leads to and promotes the freedom, happiness, connection and wholeness we seek as human beings.

Our tendency today is to regard the various religions as spiritual retail outlets, each putting its program on offer in competition for the consumer loyalty of shoppers – in recent decades called seekers or the unchurched. As we should expect, each name-brand religion has terms and conditions that are unique to its history and worldview. In addition to its characterization of what we need to get “through, out of, or beyond,” each religion has its own individualized set of symbols, key figures, sources of authority, and moral codes that members are expected to honor.

Muhammad and the Quran are not featured in Christianity, and neither are the teachings of Jesus or Christian atonement theories studied in Buddhist temples. The halacha and mitzvah of Moses are not among the devotional aspirations of a Native American vision quest, nor is zazen practiced in Islam. When we view the religions according to what makes them unique and different from each other, the way of salvation seems like it must be one choice among many.

In face of such confusion, perhaps secular atheism has it right: Do away with religion altogether and the world will be a better place for us all.

If you care to study religion more deeply, however, you will understand that it (in all its healthy varieties) is a sociohistorical expression of something much more profound. Here the terminological distinction between religion and spirituality is helpful, so long as we can resist setting these against each other, as when religion becomes “organized religion” and spirituality gets relegated to one’s individual quest for inner peace or mystical insight.

Religion and spirituality go together – and always have – in the same way as the vital life of a tree goes with the material structure of its roots, trunk, branches and leaves. Our own inner life is always (and only) inner to an outer mortal body. These are not two things that can be separated, but two aspects of one reality distinguished in a fuller understanding.

The questionable doctrine of the immortal soul notwithstanding, this dynamic unity of two aspects (inner essence and outer expression) cannot be divided. Not only do “inner” and “outer” imply each other logically (i.e., in thought), they are inseparably united ontologically (i.e., in being) as well.

It’s not as if the inner life of a tree can exist outside and without the support of its physical system. Nor can the inner life of soul persist absent the body; it is inner only to a whole self, not as one part that can be separated from another part. In the same way, religion without spirituality is dead, but spirituality cannot exist without embodiment in religion. Religion comprises the symbols, stories, beliefs, rituals, and practices that embody the spirituality of individuals in community. Such expressions or outer forms can be highly relevant and effective in what they do, serving to channel the essence or inner life of spirituality into our shared experience.

But these forms can also fall out of alignment and lose relevance, as when the model of reality (cosmology) serving as backdrop to early Christian myths shifted by virtue of scientific discovery from a three-story fixed structure to an outwardly expanding universe. This cosmological shift gradually rendered the sacred stories – of angels descending, a savior ascending, the Holy Spirit descending, the savior descending again, and the company of true believers ascending at last to be with god forever in heaven – literally nonsense. Or at least nonsense if taken literally.

Unfortunately, when religion is sliding into irrelevance, believers, at the admonition of their leaders, can start to insist on the literal reading of sacred stories. If the savior did not literally (that is, factually) go up to heaven and will not literally come back down to earth, and very soon, what becomes of these stories, the canon of scripture, and to the entire tradition of faith? Since a “true story” must be based in fact, and facts are properties of physical reality, then these stories must be literally true or not at all. When this error in narrative interpretation finds a footing in religion, the whole enterprise starts to close in on itself and the lifeline to a deeper spirituality is lost.

If we were to open the religions again to the wellspring of spirituality we would witness a renaissance of creativity, meaning, and joy across the human family. The culturally unique elements would be appreciated as eloquent “styles” in the expression of our inner life as a species, flourishing in fertile niches of geography, history, tradition, and community.

The metaphorical narratives of mythology is where spirituality first breaks the surface into cultural expression. By looking through these narrative expressions, deeper into the unique and culture-specific elements, we can discern what I will call the “Shining Way” of salvation. Again, I’m not using this term salvation as a program of world-escape but instead as a guiding path towards our fulfillment and well-being as individuals, communities, and earthlings. As I’ve tried to unpack the finer details in many other posts of this blog, here we will only take in the big picture and broad strokes of this Shining Way.

We begin life in a state of unconscious oneness, where our individual consciousness is yet undifferentiated from the provident environments of mother’s womb and the family circle. This is the state depicted in myth as a garden paradise, where every requirement of life is spontaneously satisfied and reality is fully sufficient to our needs. Consciousness is completely anchored in the synchronicity of the body’s urgencies and the enveloping rhythms of providence. We call this our ‘first nature’ since it is what ushers us into the animal realm of instinct, survival, and the life-force.

It was out of this unconscious oneness that our individual identity gradually emerged and gained form. What we call our ‘second nature’ consists of the habits – the routines of behavior, feeling, and belief – that our tribe used to shape us into a well-behaved and obedient member of the group. This is a period of growing self-consciousness, of sometimes painful experiences of separation from the earlier state of immersion where we felt enveloped and secure.

In mythology it is that fateful transition away from oneness and into a separate center of personal identity known as ‘the fall’. Paradoxically it is at once both a loss and a gain, a fall out of unconscious oneness and an exciting entrée to a self-conscious existence.

As our second nature, ego ideally develops increasing strength, particularly through the formative years of childhood. Again ideally, we will arrive at a point where our personality is stable (based in a calm and coherent nervous state), balanced (emotionally centered), and unified (managed under an executive sense of who we are) – the key indicators of ego strength.

I have to insert that ominous qualifier ‘ideally’ because ego consciousness doesn’t always advance in the direction of our creative authority as individuals. If our mother’s womb and early family circle were not all that provident – subjecting us to dangerous toxins, stress hormones, abuse or neglect – and because we inevitably make some poor choices of our own, ego can get stuck in a closing spiral of neurotic self-obsession.

As I have explored in other posts, theism is a form of religion that features the super-ego of a patron deity who authorizes a tribe’s moral code and serves as its literary model in the character development of devotees. Theism is a necessary stage in the evolution of religion, just as ego formation is a necessary stage in human development. But just as ego needs to eventually open up to a larger transpersonal mode of consciousness (we’ll get to that in a bit), a healthy theism must also unfold into a larger post-theistic perspective.

Ego and patron deity co-evolve, that is to say, and when ego formation goes awry, theism becomes pathological. Now you have a social system that is both a projection of ego neurosis and a magnifier of it throughout the collective of like-minded believers.

A neurotic ego is deeply insecure, defensive around that insecurity, conceited (“It’s all about me”), and unable to think outside the box of belief (i.e., dogmatic). Not surprisingly, these traits find their counterpart in the portrait of god among pathological forms of theism. Ironically, while these forms of theism tend to glorify separation, aggression, and violence in their concepts of god, on the Shining Way of salvation these are seen as the source of our greatest suffering.

But let’s get back to the good news.

When ego strength has been achieved in our second nature, we are able to surrender our center of identity for a larger and fuller experience of life. In Christian mythology, this release of the personal center is represented in the scene where Jesus surrenders his will to a higher calling and commits his life on the cross into the hands of a compassionate and forgiving god.

NOTE: I’m keeping the action in the present tense because the myth is not primarily an account of the past, but rather an archetypal representation of the Shining Way. As archetype, Jesus in early Christian mythology is not merely a historical individual of long ago, but represents humanity as a whole. He is, as the apostle Paul recognized, the Second Adam or New Man, the turning point into a new age.

When we surrender our center of personal identity, consciousness can expand beyond the small horizon of “me and mine.” What we come to is not a larger sense of ourselves but, as Siddhartha observed, an awareness of ‘no-self’, an experience of consciousness dropping the illusion of separation and ego’s supposed reality. What the neurotic ego would certainly regard and strenuously resist as catastrophic oblivion is experienced instead as boundless presence.

Such insight marks the breakthrough to unity consciousness and is represented in myth as the Buddha’s earth-shaking affirmation under the Bodhi tree, and as the resurrection of Christ from the dead.

According to the Shining Way, liberation from the habits and conditions of our second nature leads us by transcendence to our higher nature. We have progressed in our adventure, then, from a primordial unconscious oneness, through the ordeals and complications of self-consciousness, and with the successful release of attachments we come at last to the conscious wholeness of body and soul, self and other, human and nature.

If we’re going to work this out, we will have to do it together. There is no other way.

Spiritual intelligence (SQ) has nothing to do with religious orthodoxy, how much you know about metaphysics, or whether you possess super-normal abilities like yogic flying, seeing into the future, or bending spoons with your mind. Maybe it’s because I can’t do any of those things, that I define spiritual intelligence without appealing to special gifts. As I use the term, spiritual intelligence refers to our largely uncultivated virtue of consciousness which enables us to experience the depth and unity of existence.

This mode of consciousness is uncultivated not because it is buried in esoteric metaphysics or requires years of intensive meditation to develop, but rather for the comparatively more simple reason that our attention is tied up with other things. Specifically with things having to do with the construction, maintenance, and promotion of our personal identity, also known as ego.

But lest we think that any hope of awaking spiritual intelligence depends on our success in beating down, cancelling out, or otherwise eliminating ego consciousness, it’s imperative to understand that our spiritual awakening requires ego strength, not its diminishment.

A healthy ego is energetically stable and emotionally balanced, serving to unify the personality under an executive center of self-control. Because so many things can compromise the achievement of ego strength – early trauma, childhood abuse, a dysfunctional home environment, chronic illness – many of us end up somewhere on the spectrum of ego pathology, as what is generally called a neurotic ego.

Characteristics of this condition include insecurity, anxiousness, compensatory attachments, binary (either/or) thinking, inflexible beliefs (convictions), and difficulty trusting oneself, others, or reality as a whole. Perhaps not surprisingly, individuals who struggle in this way are often attracted to religions that insist on our sinful condition, our need to be cleansed or changed, and that promise a future glory for the faithful.

As I said, while only a small percentage of us are completely incapacitated by ego pathology, all of us are faced with the challenge of working through our hangups and getting over ourselves. In what follows, I will assume a sufficient degree of ego strength, enough to provide a stable point from which we, by virtue of an activated spiritual intelligence, are able to drop beneath and leap beyond the person we think we are.

My diagram presents a map of reality, along with the different ways that consciousness engages with it. The nested concentric circles represent the various horizons corresponding to distinct evolutionary stages in the formation of our universe. Thus the largest horizon, that of energy, was earliest and also includes all the others, as they represent its further (and later) transformations.

Energy crystallized in material form, physical complexity gave rise to life (organic), the life process gradually evolved abilities of detection, reaction, perception, and feeling (sentience), which after a long journey eventually developed the faculty of self-conscious awareness (egoic). This is the transformation which is heavily managed by our tribe, in the construction of personal identity and moral agency.

Identity is a function of what we identify as, and what, or whom, we identify with. Personal identity will always be located inside a social membership of some sort, where the individual identifies as “one of us,” and in turn identifies with other insiders and their common interests. The tribe shaped our emerging self-conscious awareness so that we would fit in, share our toys, wait our turn, and not rock the boat.

Our life has meaning by virtue of the stories that form our character and weave personal experience into the larger patterns of social tradition and cultural mythology. If we assume that the construction of a secure identity is the end-game of human development, then this is where we will stay.

Things can get complicated here because some tribes need their members to fervently believe that this way is the one and only way. Everything from religious orthodoxy to consumer marketing is dedicated to making sure that individuals are fully invested in “me” (identify-as) and “mine” (identify-with). As long as they can stand convinced that the tradition holds their key to security, happiness, and immortality, members who are under the spell of a consensus trance will be ready to sacrifice (or destroy) everything for its truth.

The global situation today is compelling many a tradition to pull in its horizon of membership, so as to include only those who possess certain traits or have surrendered totally to its ideology.

And yet, because human beings do harbor the potential for spiritual awakening, any effort to cap off the impetus of their full development will end up generating a spiritual frustration in the individual, which will ripple out from there into the membership as discontent, suspicions, and conflicts arise.

My diagram illustrates personal identity (ego) as occupying the center of everything and sitting at the apex of evolution, where consciousness bends back on itself in self-conscious awareness. As long as the individual is fully wrapped up in the adventures of Captain Ego, the rest of reality – that vast depth and expanse which are essential to what (rather than who) we are – goes unnoticed.

Underneath and roundabout our self-absorbed condition is the present mystery of reality. As the Polynesian proverb goes: Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.

In reality, our existence is the manifestation of a grounding mystery (or Ground) which plunges deep and far below that little outpost of self-conscious awareness at the surface. This ground of being will not be found outside the self but only within, for the deep structure of reality itself is present also in us. Underneath and supporting ego consciousness is a sentient nervous system. Beneath and upholding that is the living organism of this body, rising gently in waves of vital rhythm. Still farther down – and, remember, deeper into – the life process are the crystalline lattices of matter. They in turn bind up and dissolve again into the vibrant cloud of quantum energy.

You’ll notice how the ever-deeper release of our meditation opens to us an experience of ever-greater capacity, the essential depths and fullness of what we are as human beings. Notice, too, that we don’t have to exert a vigorous discipline on the ego in order to get it out of the way. We simply need to let go, so that consciousness can be released from its surface conceit of personal identity and drop into the ineffable (wordless and indescribable) mystery of being-itself.

This is one aspect of an awakened spirituality: We experience the internal depths of all things by descending into our own. Everything below that magenta horizontal line, then, is deep, down, and within – not just of our own existence but of existence itself.

Above the line is out, around, and beyond the center of ego consciousness – beyond who we think we are. As we go down, then, awareness is simultaneously opening out to the turning unity of all things. The horizon of personal concerns gives way to a more inclusive sphere of sentient beings. As we identify as a sentient being, we also identify with all sentient beings.

This down (within) and out (beyond) shift of consciousness is what awakened Siddhartha’s universal compassion; he understood directly that suffering (pain, striving, frustration, and loss) is the shared condition of sentient beings everywhere.

Continuing in this down-and-out fashion, the descent of awareness into the organic rhythms of our body takes us to the still-farther horizon of all living things. And within/beyond that is the horizon of matter in motion, the revolving cosmos itself, which finally surrenders to the quantum energy cloud where this whole spectacle is suspended. So at the same time as consciousness is descending into the ground of being, it is also ascending through the system of all things, the turning-together-as-one (literally ‘universe’). Inwardly we come to experience the full capacity of our being, as outwardly we transcend to the awareness that All is One.

These are not logical deductions, mind you, but spontaneous intuitions of our spiritual intelligence. It sleeps in each of us, waiting for its opportunity to awaken and set us free.

The universe is a great Web of Life. You might argue that because so much of it is uninhabitable (dead rocks and nuclear furnaces) we should keep our discussion on the topic of life focused solely on our home planet. But we must remember that Earth is itself a product of the Universal Process which began some 14 billion years ago, and even if our planet was the only place where life exists across the entire 96 billion-light-year diameter of the observable cosmos, we are logically bound to the conclusion that the universe is alive. And conscious. And holding this thought, right now.

The Web of Life, then, extends out into the cosmic surround, includes the whole earth, the vibrant system of living things called nature, and your body as an organismic member of this system. Your body can’t survive apart from the support of nature, nature can’t continue without the favorable conditions of Earth, the earth wouldn’t exist had not the universal process conspired in the way it did for our planet to get formed and flung around its home star.

You may feel separate and all alone at times, but that’s something else, not your body.

I have placed you in the above diagram, nestled in the Web of Life as an embodied and natural earthling, a child of the cosmos and latter-day descendant of stars. For now we’ll focus on the purple figure outlined in black, ignoring everything behind you and to the right. Black is my color code for your animal nature, which is extroverted in its orientation to the environment (nature, Earth, cosmos) as you reach out for the shelter, resources, and connections you need to live.

Purple represents your inner awareness, oriented inwardly to the grounding mystery of consciousness. Also called the Ground of Being, it is how our provident universe is experienced from within, so to speak, in the uplift of existence. This grounding mystery of being can only be found within as you detach attention from the sensory-physical realm and allow awareness to drop past “mine” (property and attributes), “me” (the felt object of self), and “I” (the center of personal identity), into the deep and timeless present.

Consciousness has no object at this point. Ground is merely a metaphor reflecting the experience of mystery as both source and support of existence in this moment.

This duality of outer and inner orientations of consciousness, one through the body and out to the Web of Life, and the other through the soul and deeper into the Ground of Being, is what constitutes your essential self as a human being. You are a human animal (body) with a capacity for contemplating the inner mystery of being (soul). Because your highly evolved brain and nervous system make this dual orientation possible, you and your species may be the only ones with an ability to contemplate your place in the provident universe.

I should be clear that it’s not entirely by virtue of your advanced nervous system that you are able to break past the boundaries of personal identity for a larger (Web) or deeper (Ground) experience of reality. You need a center of personal identity (color coded orange in my diagram) in place to make such transpersonal experiences even possible. We call them transpersonal precisely because they are about going beyond the personal center of identity and its limited frame of reference. The center is who you think you are, and the frame is a construction of meaning where your identity belongs. It is your world.

Things get interesting at this point, and not just a little complicated, since ego formation is not an instinct-driven process, but instead depends on your tribe. The construction of identity and its frame of reference (world) is accomplished over the first three decades of your life. During that time your tribe is selecting or suppressing temperamental predispositions according to its standards of a ‘good boy’ or ‘nice girl’. As time goes on, the incentives for compliance evolve from candy or spankings, to grades, degrees, bonuses, and promotions. The goal is to shape you into “one of us,” someone who belongs, follows directions, and will do anything for the sake of honor.

Even though your personal identity is a social construction, your tribe still had to work with (and on) an animal nature that really doesn’t care very much about rules and expectations. A strong instinct for self-preservation needed to be reconditioned so that you could learn how to share and make sacrifices. Impulses connected to elimination, aggression, and sexual behavior had to be brought under control and put on a proper schedule. The means for accomplishing all of this is called social conditioning, and the primary psycho-mechanism for its success is the ego.

Somehow your constructed identity needed to be sufficiently separated from the animal urgencies of your body, but without losing the tether to your embodied essential self.

This is where, in the deeper cultural history of our species, religion progressed out of animism and into theism. The higher power of a patron deity not only served to give supernatural sanction to tribal morality, but it functioned also as a literary role-model. I say ‘literary’ because patron deities live only in the storytelling imagination (aka mythology). Every deity is a kind of personality construct, a literary invention and projected ideal reflecting back to the tribe those character traits and virtues which the community aspires to emulate. In exchange for their worship, sacrifice, and obedience, the patron deity bestows favors and rewards (e.g., success in childbirth, bountiful harvests, increases in wealth, and beatitude in the next life).

If we look closely at the patron deities of name-brand religions today, we can identify three qualities common to them all. Underneath and behind the tribe-specific virtues, its devotees honor their deity as immortal, supreme, and absolute. In the pictorial language of myth these translate into a depiction of the deity as separate, above, and outside the ordinary world of everyday concerns.

An even closer look will reveal these qualities as the driving aspirations of ego as well.

In the need to establish a separate center of personal identity, ego must first be differentiated from the body. Because the body is mortal, ego must be – or aspire to become – immortal. Notice that the ego’s status with respect to the body is ‘not’ (im-) mortal, a simple negation without any meaningful content. In addition to being separate from the body, ego takes its position above the body (the literal root meaning of the word ‘supreme’) and manages things from up there. Finally, as a final move of separation, ego begins to regard itself as essentially independent and outside the realm of bodily concerns – just like the deity.

According to my theory of post-theism, the intended outcome of theism is the internalization of the patron deity’s ‘godly virtues’, to the point where its projected ideal is no longer needed. The individual assumes creative authority in his or her life, taking responsibility for modeling the virtues of maturity, ego strength, and community interest. This is especially important to up-and-coming theists (the younger generation), who need taller powers to show them how to be and what to do.

Throughout this very fascinating game we can’t forget your essential self. The construct of identity can now serve in the transpersonal experiences of empathy, communion, and wholeness. If we can survive ego’s pursuit of immortal glory, these are the promise of our human future.

The essential function of mythology is to link together individual consciousness (psyche; psychology) and the larger order of existence (cosmos; cosmology). Its collection of sacred stories provides the orientation, guidance, connection, and support that we need for success in the project of constructing meaning and living well. Because this project is profoundly (i.e., deeply) social, the myths were never ‘mere stories’ on the shelf for leisure reading, but great epic narratives to be recited and performed in the context of community life.

That is, until fairly recently.

As the advance of science inevitably altered our model of reality, the sacred myths which had draped and adorned this framework fell steadily out of relevance, and then soon afterwards, out of fashion as well. Without an alignment between our narrative constructions of mythology and our changing understanding of the universe, the sacred stories either had to be updated accordingly; discarded and forgotten; turned into allegories of hidden (metaphysical) secrets; or taken literally as journalistic accounts of supernatural revelations and miraculous events.

Another option would be to more directly engage the challenge of linking consciousness and existence in order to create a relevant mythology for our time. It likely won’t be about a literal heaven and hell, but rather about outer space and inner ground, the global neighborhood and sustainable community, planetary stewardship and a more perfect union.

To help in this effort, I offer an image for our consideration. The diagram above incorporates a medieval painting of the three realms – heaven, earth, and hell – a mental model widely held throughout the ancient world as depicting the structure of reality. The specific divine, human, or demonic personalities inhabiting these three realms, along with the sacred storylines (myths) that crisscrossed and weaved them together, differed, of course, from one culture and historical period to the next. My intention is not to explore and interpret the individual myths, but only to use this structural design of three realms in a way that might contribute meaningfully to a mythology for our secular and global age.

Just as the ancients understood, our experience unfolds in the middle realm of daily life. Our attention, energy, and effort get directed into those activities and concerns that conspire toward a general sense of meaning. Although we possess an animal nature in our body and its primal instincts, the special concern of human consciousness is with the affairs and challenges of our life together in community. This is where our identities are shaped and instructed with the tribe’s worldview and cache of wisdom for how to make it in the world.

Ego consciousness – the separate center of personal identity whose dual ambition to belong and be recognized, to fit in and stand out at the same time, generates both external and internal conflicts – is thus the principal denizen of this middle realm.

In another blog of mine, less philosophical and more therapeutic, I provide a simple yet highly useful schematic of 5 Domains for looking at life as a whole but also moving into the details for making the changes we desire. A recent post, titled Creators and Reactors, offered the image of a tree as a way of understanding the 5 Domains and their holistic integration.

Each of the 5 Domains holds a relatively small set of basic obligations that must be fulfilled on a regular basis in order to optimize the quality of life in that domain. For example, an optimized spirituality requires that we give time to quiet reflection and finding our way to that still place at the center of our existence (which I call The Clearing) through such meditation practices as mindful breathing, contemplation, and centering prayer. A calm body and centered mind are conducive to an inner release to the grounding mystery and its ineffable intuition of oneness.

Without such practices – or worse, through the uncontrolled spin-out in frantic or mindless activity – our spirituality doesn’t get the investment it needs to be the nourishing root system of our life.

The middle realm, then, is where we either take responsibility for the variety of obligations across our 5 Domains, or otherwise neglect them, ignore them, avoid them, and put them off till ‘later’. But here we are: faced with the things that need our attention, standing at a ‘Y’ in our path. Depending on the choice we make at this point, our consciousness and quality of life will either shift upward or downward, into an upper realm or a lower realm, heaven or hell.

Once again, I am not using these terms as references to different locations in the universe, and not even as metaphysical dimensions of reality. Instead, they are meant to indicate distinct registers of consciousness – moods, motivations, attitudes, and perspectives (in short, mindsets) – that link psyche and cosmos by very different stories and contrary mythologies.

So that we can end this post on a positive note, let’s begin with the descent into hell.

Hell

When we are irresponsible with the obligations of wellbeing, not taking care of the things that elevate our quality of life across the 5 Domains, our general picture begins to degenerate into something quite unpleasant. Remember those simple practices of spirituality that deepen our sense of inner peace? When we neglect or avoid them, the opposite of inner peace takes its place: insecurity. Instead of releasing our separate identity (ego) to the grounding mystery within, we desperately struggle to keep from falling into the abyss of extinction.

Let’s play this all the way out.

Our spiritual insecurity signals the body to release stress hormones, keeping us hypervigilant and defensive, but also suspending metabolic and immunity functions in the interest of emergency action. And when we’re all neurotic and knotted up in this way, how does it go in our relationships? Not well. We tend to be reactive, suspicious, distrustful, and self-absorbed. We also pull other equally neurotic partners into our life, forming dysfunctional and codependent attachments that serve to confirm and reinforce our general anxiety over the state of things. The problem here is that our character continues to be shaped and instructed in this negative social milieu, which means that we become takers and consumers, grasping for our share and ripping into anyone who threatens our stash. Finally, as it concerns our lifeplan and vision for the future – well, there’s just no energy or time for that. Holding off the next catastrophe has become our full-time obsession.

I think that’s a pretty good description of hell, don’t you? The urgency of a life out of balance and collapsing upon itself; a hostage of our own convictions, a captive of destructive forces, bound by fear and feeling stuck in a hole that just keeps getting deeper. Hell is the deepest of all depressions.

Or … we might choose the other way.

Heaven

Taking responsibility in the obligations of wellbeing means that we don’t wait around for someone else to live our life or save us from our problems. We do what is necessary and required in order to optimize our quality of life in all 5 Domains. We cultivate inner peace, make healthy choices, love others (even those who oppose us), serve the greater good, and relentlessly pursue a more perfect union.

Heaven really isn’t that far away. Indeed it’s been right here all the time, just waiting for us to enter. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke, “The kingdom of God is within/among you” (Luke 17:21). All the great wisdom teachers of history are in fundamental agreement on one thing: When we know the truth, the truth will make us free.

I guess I write a lot about what I feel is most urgently needing our attention these days. Current events are interesting because they’re in the news and on our minds, but popular engagement with the news of the day tends to skim the surface of what’s really going on. It’s not nuclear proliferation, terrorist plots, melting ice caps, or the next election that we should be figuring out, but the deeper forces that are presently driving and shaping our reality.

We need a psychological model that reveals the truth about ourselves without reducing us to mindless matter, on one side, or elevating us to metaphysical dimensions, on the other. Importantly it should provide an honest accounting of both the promises and liabilities that attach to our human nature, in a way that makes sense in a secular and global age. The elements of my model are not new in themselves, but I offer definitions and relationships among the elements that are novel – and, I hope, relevant to the current challenges we face.

My diagram above draws an arc of development from a body-centered (early) phase, through an ego-centered (middle) phase, and reaching fulfillment in a soul-centered (late) phase. I’ve joined body and soul in something of a tensive image, stretching between the animal and spiritual aspects of our essential nature. A simple statement of this essential nature is that we are ‘spiritual animals’, animals with a capacity for imagination, creativity, contemplation, transcendence, and communion.

We are not ‘souls in bodies’ or ‘bodies with souls’, but rather a marvelous duality of consciousness that is at once centered in life (body) and grounded in being (soul).

Before we hitch a ride with ego along that rising and falling arc, let’s spend a little more time getting to know the body where its hero journey begins. In other posts I have characterized body as naturally extroverted, that is, as flexing consciousness outward to the surrounding environment and continuously regulating its own internal state (as an organism) according to those external cues and conditions. The body’s own internal urgencies operate for the most part below our conscious awareness and almost entirely outside our conscious control. We might regard the body itself as a highly evolved energy exchange between external resources and these internal urgencies, between the provident conditions of the environment and its own metabolic demands as a living organism.

Ego formation (the rising arc of personal development) entails some decisive negotiations with the body’s animal nature, a process that is motivated and supervised by our tribe. The expected outcome of this process is a centered identity that sees itself as belonging to ‘us’, obediently performing roles that contribute to the welfare of the group. What we call morality is the set of rules, values, incentives, and deterrents that constrain us to behave like a ‘good boy’ or ‘nice girl’ and eventually as a compliant member of the tribe.

Psychologically ego formation is also where reality starts to divide in two, with an objective (‘thrown-over’) world on one side, and a subjective (‘thrown-under’) self on the other side of this line. World here is not a synonym for reality, as we sometimes speak of ‘the real world’ as a factual and nonfictional realm beyond us. As I use the term, world refers to the construct of symbols, language, meaning, and morality that ego, with the help of its tribe, builds around itself. Much of it is (in fact) fictional, in the sense of being a narrative construction of metaphors and stories that form a cross-referencing web of meaning where an individual feels secure.

Self is also a narrative construct made from strands of memory, preferences, beliefs, and ambitions that connect into a relatively continuous braid of character which ego identifies as ‘me’. As a construct, self is no more real than the world in which ego finds refuge and significance. Personal identity, therefore, represents a separate project from the deeper evolutionary one of becoming a mature and fully actualized human being. Indeed, the project of identity-formation can seriously impede and even completely undermine human progress in this larger sense.

Instead of an ego that is stable, balanced, and unified – together comprising a virtue known as ‘ego strength’ – development gets arrested in one or more spectrum disorders (borderline personality, bipolar mood, or dissociative identity).

Getting stuck here – arrested, hooked, fixated – is what lies behind so much suffering that individuals chronically endure and proceed to inflict on each other. Rather than operating from a position of creative authority where the adaptive compatibility between self and world affords the freedom and responsibility to be oneself, neurotic insecurity closes the mind inside rigid convictions and condemns the individual to a prison of shame and conceit, impotence and aggression, profound doubt and fundamentalist certainty, all or nothing.

Increasingly desperate bids for security turn into deadly campaigns for supremacy; or else, which in the long run amounts to the same thing, a final relief from torment through suicide.

A critical deficiency in ego strength prevents an individual from being able to ‘go beyond’, or transcend, the self-and-world construct for the sake of a larger and more authentic experience. Creative inspiration, mystical contemplation, empathic communion, genuinely open dialogue – such experiences are unavailable to the personality which is trapped inside itself.

These experiences, sought and celebrated in healthy cultures, are only possible as ego succeeds in letting go, dropping out, and moving beyond the conventional structures of meaning, deeper into the present mystery of reality.

And thus we have arrived at our consideration of soul, as that introspective turn of consciousness to its own grounding mystery. Even here, however, ego might attempt to take control and claim the inner life of soul as merely another name for subjectivity, for the permanent core of personal identity. I’ve suggested in other posts that this error of mistaken identity is behind the widespread religious doctrine of personal immortality. It’s essential to note, however, that the grounding mystery within is neither the ego, its personality, nor the self of ‘who I am.’

Despite the obvious popularity of the idea across cultures, the invention of personal immortality marks a serious corruption in our proper understanding of the soul.

When ego is transcended – not negated, rejected, renounced, or subjugated, but released and surpassed in a more inclusive, holistic, and unitive experience – consciousness sinks into its own grounding mystery and proceeds thence (or perhaps simultaneously) outwards along the expanding horizons of sensory awareness to the breakthrough insight that All is One. From deep within, far below the surface concerns of our historical situation, we find the grace to relax into being, open ourselves to reality, and ponder our place in the turning rhythms of a universal order (or universe).

This is the birthplace of philosophy, according to its original intention as the ‘love of wisdom’. Only as we achieve liberation from the centripetal (shrinking and tightening) constraints of personal identity can we appreciate the astonishing truth that, in us, the universe is contemplating itself. If we can be faithful in this practice, those chronic and intractable problems that are currently threatening to undo us will simply unwind and fall away.

A somewhat naive understanding of human evolution and individual development assumes that with each advancing stage, former ones are simply outgrown and left behind. We know, however, that this is not how nature evolves. Earlier and more primitive structures are not abandoned, and neither do they merely lie inert beneath the exciting progress higher up. Instead they get incorporated into the emerging design, differently managed or re-purposed in light of a greater functional complexity.

This matters a lot when it comes to the interpretations of our own progress as individuals and a species. The naive approach has treated our mythological past, for instance, as over and done, leaving us free to face reality (finally!) as it is. Scientific theories relentlessly pursue objective truth, while the ancient myths may entertain us but in the end only obfuscate our view of what’s real. We need more facts, not superstition. The presumption is that our ancestors and other distant cultures stumbled around in ignorance, whereas we now clearly see the way things really are.

A closer look reveals that earlier versions of ourselves – whether bygone generations or former decades in our own lifetime – continue to operate underneath and behind whatever ‘executive functions’ are currently at the helm. In developmental psychology we commonly speak of our ‘inner child’ which refers to an infantile and juvenile subpersonality (Assagioli) that sometimes takes over when we’re tired, sick, hungry, stressed, or threatened. But we should also take into account a still more primal animal nature that lurks in the unconscious and is governed by instinct. These deeper and developmentally earlier versions may not determine our engagement with reality as they once did, but a mature adult must learn how to incorporate ‘gut feelings’ and playful spontaneity in a more socially responsible way of life.

Most likely our biggest limitation has to do with the fact that each advancing stage in development reconnects us with reality in a new way. Or we might say that each stage in development initiates a shift in reality itself, for the straightforward reason that our mode of engagement with reality must be included in what is meant by the term. Along the path of human evolution, then, our species has confronted a new reality at each turn. And across the arc of our evolution these developmental advances have carried forward former versions of ourselves, still operating at deeper and less conscious levels.

I propose that human beings have evolved through three major ‘reality shifts’ and that we are currently on the cusp of a fourth. This is similar to the well-known ‘paradigm shift’ concept made popular from the history of science (T. Kuhn), except that as a constructivist – maybe even a radical constructivist – I want to make it about more than a mere shift in the (mental) “frameworkcontainingthebasicassumptions,waysofthinking, andmethodologythatarecommonlyacceptedbymembersofa scientific [or other type of] community” (Paradigm in Dictionary.com). When our framework shifts, everything about our way of engaging with reality also shifts, which means that because reality necessarily includes our way of engaging it, reality itself shifts as well.

Mythopoetic Reality

The first reality shift, and the one that launched our species on its cultural trajectory, is what I’ll call the mythopoetic. Poiein is Greek for ‘to make’, and mythos translates as ‘a narrative plot’ or story; so a mythopoetic reality is one where our engagement with existence is facilitated by the narrative construction of stories. I don’t agree with a popular definition of myth which dismisses it as ‘primitive science’, our first bumbling attempts to explain what’s going on around us in the natural world. Rather, myths articulate and embellish upon foundational metaphors that represent our deepest impressions and intuitions of the grounding mystery, or what I also call the provident ground of being itself.

It’s important to understand that a story-shaped reality has no ‘outside’ – no nonfictional or purely factual realm independent of the mythic imagination. This reality is sustained in the activity of narrative performances where stories are acted out in the tasks of daily life, with the turn of seasons, on special occasions, and around the shared concerns of a community. Whatever may lie beyond the boundaries of a particular story-world is not a ‘mere fact’ but is characterized according to its proximity and potential value to what’s going on inside the story – such as the chaos acknowledged in many ancient myths, dragons lurking at the edges of medieval maps, or the boogeyman in a child’s closet.

As that last example suggests, early childhood is when each of us lived in a mythopoetic reality. We were continuously pretending – daydreaming, fantasizing, dressing up, role-playing, embarking on one adventure after another. In those years we had no interest in, let alone an understanding of, the factual reality that would later become the bedrock truth of our adult experience. That time in our lives – whatever we can remember of it – is probably our best entry to an understanding of what prehistoric story-telling culture was like.

Historical Reality

At some point in the evolutionary past, as well as in our own personal past, the sacred canopy of mythopoetic reality came down – or at least fell just far enough to expose another reality on the other side of our stories. I will call this the shift to historical reality, a shift reflecting the progress of human consciousness beyond the security, meaning, and hope we had earlier found in our myths. For a memory of what it was like, we need to recall that strange mixture of exhilaration and anxiety we felt in adolescence.

The exhilaration came as our perception of time expanded beyond the ‘once upon a time’ and ‘happily ever after’ frame of the story-world, into a causal stream seemingly without beginning or end. As the boundary of our mythopoetic reality blew open to reveal a limitless field of possibilities, the opportunity as well as temptation for all things exotic beckoned to us. On the other side of that exhilaration, however, was an anxiety over our sudden ‘nakedness’ – a niggling self-conscious sense of being stared at. Both of these powerful moods (exhilaration and anxiety) announced the emergence of a separate center of personal identity, or ego.

This separate self provided a new vantage point on a reality without limits (except for those repressive rules imposed on us by authorities), arranged and revolving around ego at its fixed center. It is in this reality and corresponding version of ourselves that an irresistible impulse to throw off constraints and ‘become as the gods’ – free, powerful, and beyond accountability – acquired the drag of guilt and shame for our offense. You should be able to hear a strong theistic theme here, which resolved the problem of separation by a process of atonement and reconciliation.

The dawn of historical consciousness is accompanied by a disenchantment with the mythopoetic reality of early life, which comes as a consequence of ego’s separation from its own grounding mystery. Whereas the mythic imagination continues to operate farther below, the executive ego – or what I also name Captain Ego – is having to take into account a factual realm altogether independent of it. This forces upon ego a need to decide the truth status of those stories, and a few alternatives become obvious.

One answer is that the myths are simple stories of an era when we believed such things. Now we know better and should dispense with them in the interest of progress. A second option, related to the first, might regard the myths as amusing tales that provide a fascinating look inside a less enlightened period.

Another possibility is that myths are descriptive reports of miraculous events and supernatural things revealed in the far-distant past and recorded for our benefit, but of events and things not presently accessible to our senses. This is the option that led to converting the literary (or mythological) god into a literal being, and invented the idea of a supernatural realm above and outside historical reality.

Finally, a fourth answer to the question ‘wherefore the myths?’ would be to explore them as metaphorical clues to our deeper spiritual life. Of the four options, this one is by far the least popular; ego has a hard time with metaphors and anything deeper than its own personality. The doctrine of personal immortality, another invention of this reality shift, dismisses all notions of a spirituality that threatens to swallow up, go beyond, or dissolve away the permanent self.

Secular Reality

The shift to a secular reality came about as the inherited system of supernaturally oriented beliefs rapidly lost relevance to the challenges and opportunities of daily life. This coincides with a shift in consciousness from the insecure and self-conscious ego to a more ’embodied’ and this-worldly (Latin saeculāris) orientation. Such an orientation, while portending the end of supernatural religion and biblical literalists (option 3 above) everywhere, is energetically embraced by many atheists and mystics alike.

‘Humanist’ is probably the best term for describing the emerging value system of this reality shift, as the larger cause for human rights, individual happiness, and personal well-being informs and qualifies more of what we do. The weight and promise of our current situation calls for a clear view of the facts and a more broad-based social responsibility. We don’t look outside the world to a supernatural heaven, an end-time deliverance, or even a metaphysical underground to which we might escape the task before us. The resources and solutions we’re looking for must be found inside – within ourselves, our communities, and in our shared world – this world.

As odd as it sounds, the shift from historical to secular reality makes possible a renewed appreciation for life’s sacredness and what I call the Real Presence of mystery. A reverence for the earth’s elemental forces and exquisite beauties, for the fragile yet tenacious life-force evident all around, a reverence which had been intrinsic to the enchantment of mythopoetic consciousness but was later eclipsed by the rise of the historical ego, returns now, but in a consciousness that better understands its creative responsibility within the whole. Such a heightened sensitivity to the value and promise of what’s inside awakens empathy, inspires compassion, motivates cooperation, and reconciles consciousness to a reality that is more interconnected.

Global Reality

A fourth reality shift, simultaneously ascending within us and descending upon us by a conspiracy of technologies (travel, the Internet, communications, business and trade) opens awareness to our place in a global system. We are really just starting to understand the dynamics of systems – about the interactive forces that hold things together (integrity), connect individuals in higher forms of complexity (synergy), and pull everything down toward more stable states (entropy). (For more on these, see The Consilient Leader.)

As we better understand the nature of systems and our own place in the ecosystem of planet Earth, reality invites our engagement at a new level. Of course, we’ve always belonged to systems, but as consciousness opens up to our responsibilities and creative authority within the systems we inhabit, a new set of values begins to guide our choices, goals, and commitments. Living in a global reality doesn’t allow us to make decisions and take action only around individual self-interest, or even that of our local tribes.

Consequences flow out in waves of rippling influence, not by the linear cause-and-effect of billiard balls. What’s more, the most serious consequences come back on us by intricate feedback loops, slow amplification, and long delays that we cannot predict or control. But when they come, everything in the system is affected. Perhaps the most obvious example of this seeming ‘suddenness’ of catastrophic consequences is the phenomenon of global warming. The buildup of so-called greenhouse gases has been on a slow rise for many decades. But now, all of a sudden, polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate and sea levels are rising, entire species are going extinct, and convoluted weather systems are bringing upon us one disaster after another.

In my diagram above I have positioned a human stick figure with one foot in secular reality, and the other in global reality – or almost there. This is to make the point that, for the most part, our species is only beginning to grasp the bigger picture, deeper truth, and longer view of our place in the universe. We may hold this intuition in our mythic imagination, but it remains buried beneath an obsession with identity (ego) and a chauvinistic secular humanism. Even now, any incentive for altering routines and convictions must appeal to a concern for ourselves and future generations, rather than a genuine reverence for life and responsibility to the whole.

Global reality is where the evolution of consciousness has reached a point of the universe becoming aware of itself – in us. Instead of this higher awareness setting us apart from the other species, its aim is to inspire us to care more responsibly for the planetary community of life.